I fell over on the slippery street and faceplanted the pavement. It hurt A LOT!
This was the first time I’d been to hospital since the pandemic started and luckily it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I’d been led to believe. Yes the Covid restrictions are awkward and there’s no cafe area anymore, LOTS of machines out of order too I noticed, but all the staff were polite and helpful. And I left having only spent about £2.50 (on a drink and crisps) and that lack of expense is just such an endless relief to me.
Pleasure Island at Cleethorpes has been closed since 2016, a fact that depresses me slightly since I loved it as a kid. So while in the area last week me and Dave stopped and took some pictures of its ruins.
Don’t worry, we didn’t actually go in! It’s covered in barbed wire, more bafflingly there’s a trench built all the way around it, and there’s a security dog too.
There he is!
So we just got as close to the fence as possible and stuck the camera through increasingly tricky gaps.
Here’s the fairytale-like entrance to the park, not such a fairytale anymore.
Broken things everywhere.
Some castles left to rot behind barbed wire.
Who even smashed these windows?
The remains of one of the rides I remember best from Pleasure Island, the water slide. It used to stand a bit taller.
A few misc buildings round the back, and a warning message.
RIP, Pleasure Island. Here it is in happier times.
We spent last week doing that adult rite of passage, visiting relatives who are in care homes thanks to physical ailments (hopefully curable) and mental ailments (not at all curable, sigh.) It involved going back to a place I very much associate with childhood (my grandmother’s house in Cleethorpes) which kind of simultaneously made it better and worse.
Getting into the care home to visit requires a covid test every day, so you can imagine how delightful it was to see this lot protesting in a Cleethorpes park.
Anti-vaxxers aside, it wasn’t a bad trip or anything! We got to wander around some of my childhood haunts and take pictures! But it was strange. So very strange.
Haven’t done one of these in a while! Food growing is going surprisingly well.
We harvested some more potatoes, and though they have green and brown splodges on them they’re still edible! I mashed them up and ate them, as you do.
There’s also a pretty good blackberry crop this year!
And I also have an apple tree now! I suspect it will be many years before it bears fruit but still. My parents used to have apple trees and it was so fun picking them every year.
Its leaves turn brown every now and again but I’m told that’s normal.
I posted these photos of the infamous Millennium Dome back in June, but since then I’ve found more photographs of the place! Turns out my family visited it twice… I kinda suspect it was because the first visit turned out to be disappointing and my parents thought the second time would be better.
I….can’t remember if it was or not.
Here’s me being part of the “net generation.”
This pic here, where I look incredibly sulky and pissed off, gives a good idea of the scale of the Dome. (Absolutely no reblogging this photo please.)
Now I’m curious as to what that wall of screens was.
Turns out it was the Self-Portrait Zone:
Self-Portrait also featured several sculptures by political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe. With titles such as The Racist, The Couch Potato, The Thug, and Traditional Cool Britannia (caricaturing Tony Blair), these pieces were a FAR CRY from the nebulously optimistic mood of the dome. pic.twitter.com/96NSFkaW8Y
— 〽️ax krieger's big moves (@MaxKriegerVG) August 3, 2018
And I actually remember those sculptures! My 12-year-old self found them VERY unsettling (especially The Couch Potato, which was a guy melting into his sofa) but sadly I guess we didn’t take any pics of them.
This globe and spaceship marked the entrance to Home Planet, a sort of educational dark ride.
Y’know what? The Dome sold Dome-branded merchandise! And while going through old boxes I found what I myself purchased from the gift shop!
That’s it! Just a notebook with a holographic sticker on it! I wonder how much it cost to produce.
This brochure I found is quite interesting. It says “For one year only” so… Was that always the plan, to only have it open for one year? Or had things deteriorated so quickly by October they’d already decided to close it? Either way, how incredibly wasteful.
I DO remember the Blackadder film! I think it was the first Blackadder I ever saw.
CUl8tr, Dome! Though before I sign off – I ran across this photo from the same era in my boxes and boxes of photos. It’s a little LEGO dome at Legoland in 2001!
Slowly I’m going through all my family’s old VHS tapes and here’s a good one! A 1994 promo video from the UK airline Unijet, showing off all that Disneyworld and Florida had to offer to Brits.
Features footage of some now-defunct attractions including Pleasure Island, River Country, Spectromagic, and the Honey I Shrunk the Kids Movie Set Adventure (my favourite when I was a kid.) Oh, and a robot Bill Clinton.
Fun fact: For YEARS I assumed this goddamn video was the cause of my annoying-but-far-from-debilitating submechanophobia. I definitely remember that as a child I saw a clip of the Universial Studios Jaws ride and it terrified me no end. I always thought it was on this video… But why would a Disney promo video be promoting the competition? (Even in the Florida montage at the end I don’t think there’s any Universal Studios stuff!) So hmmm, maybe I’ll stumble upon that damn shark in a different video one day.
It’s been a bad week. My 95-year-old grandmother had a fall and was sent to hospital, right on my dad’s birthday. Lots of angst which is still ongoing there. COVID is still enough of a problem that I doubt anyone will be able to visit her in hospital. Yesterday when I was alone in a car park with a dead phone, a drunk guy got out of a car and started harassing me, apparently because I was wearing a mask, though it was hard to tell. Let’s file it under “mild harassment” but it was still scary. I need a better phone.
